The Civil Contingencies Secretariat and Communities and Local Government are developing a National Resilience Extranet.
They have signed a contract with BT to provide the service, which will enable the secure exchange of information in response to civil emergencies such as floods and outbreaks of agricultural diseases.
The …

Screw me.

A secure government network?

That'll be running an unpatched version of Windows 98SE (it's so old, no-one will want to hack it) and allow confidential data to be either transmitted as cleartext over standard 433MHz RF (to avoid WiFi hackers) or using USB sticks (with no password, but a "do not read / please return to" address printed on the side).

Run a bundle of fibre optic cables under the central reservations of the M1, M6 & M4

Benefit:

1. We would then lease half the fibres to commercial entities to pay for the installation and generate a revenue for the state and we no longer need to pay for all these expensive links for the existing useless intranets the government has put in place.

2. Ultra fast broadband backbone across UK

Of course as we don't employ civil servants with brains, talent or ability we'll take option 1

"Government plans ... "

My immediate reaction to the first two words in the headline was "the UK govt couldn't plan its way out of a wet paper bag if it had to."

Take this as hard evidence that the worldwide opinion of NuLabour is a bunch of total incompetents, incompetent at everything, fit for nothing, and ruining anything they touch. A sort of anti-Midas government that converts gold to cack.

Perhaps el Reg can keep a special eye on these plans and give us a blow by blow account as they morph into the usual NuLab IT debacle?

@ Neil

You've not spent much time planning secure networks Neil? Or in fact any networks?

First off - the central reservation of motorways? So that any installation or maintenance work requires the motorways to be closed or hefty roadworks to be implemented? Just laying the ducting would take years. How are you going to power and protect repeaters? Try achieving a 2-hour repair when you need to get the police to shut a motorway for you. There's a very good reason that there are no telecomms cables run along motorways.

Secondly - motorways tend to connect major cities. In the event of hostile acts wouldn't it tend to be those major cities that are affected? Do you think that in the case of dire emergency that military and government personnel head lemming-like to the centre of the nearest major city? In any civil emergency the motorways tend to be rather crowded - again making any kind of maintenance or repair activity 'tricky'.

Laying fibres is also not quite the same as building a resilient network. The kit on the end is kind of important. Unless your super secure approach is to give people torches and books on how to send morse code? A torch is admittedly impervious to EM.

There are dozens of operators providing high-speed backbones across the UK. Shoving some fibres along the M4 won't change much in terms of UK broadband. Operators selling dark fibre or managed services can't fill the capacity they have now - who's going to lease these new circuits?

Lastly - most complex problems don't have blindingly obvious "doh" type solutions. The world is complicated, the requirements are complicated and the solutions are too. That's why companies and individuals who have the knowledge, expertise and experience to provide those solutions can charge lots of money for their services.

Get the popcorn...

The gumment will have specified something huge and unwieldy without thinking through the challenges. BT will have responded with "we can do that for

It will take half a year to come up with CoCos for uncertified networks to connect to a GSi/xGSi backbone.

In parallel there will be discussions on how people authenticate. They will settle on a T-FA that is so complex and costly to administer that some key organisations fail to sign up.

I suspect documents up to RESTRICTED at the very lowest will be planned on the network. So add another year to bring in the procedures for making sure that everyone who can access it are at least SC and all machines on the network are Xcryptored.

About then, when BT have stuffed themselves at the trough and the budget is dwindling, it's scoped down to a collaboration portal accessed via a IPSEC vpn with publically available unclassified information. The potential users will look at it and wonder why they should pay 85 a seat a year and CCS and CLG (or whatever there names will be by then) will be the only contributors.